Literacy Now

Recently I have been involved in several conversations with educators about how to use iPads in the classroom for reading purposes. The content of our conversations has covered topics such as when teachers should use iPads for reading purposes in the classroom, what types of texts students should be reading, and what professional development educators need to know about reading digital text. For the purpose of this column, I will summarize a few key points about the topic and raise some related questions. It is my hope that these questions may stimulate further conversations among educators who are using iPads for reading purposes in their classrooms.

First, we know that reading digital text involves a nonlinear reading process, as reported, for example, in work by Jennifer Roswell & Anne Burke and by Julie Coiro. For that reason, how students read is as important as what they read. Research from Maryanne Wolf, for example, shows that reading digital text engages the brain in critical ways. Proponents and critics of the iPad have used the following messages to guide conversations on the topic:

Benefits

• Learners spend more time reading
• Learners engage more with texts
• Scrolling, scanning, and hyperlinks promote improved comprehension of text

Challenges

• Learners engage in more skimming vs. deep reading of text
• Multitasking distractions prevent cognitive focus
• Scrolling, scanning, and hyperlinks interact with recall and learning of information

Second, integrating the use of iPads into the classroom creates many opportunities to engage students with meaningful and critical reading practices. On one hand, iPad applications can be beneficial to students’ reading experiences. On the other hand, teachers need to instruct students how to use applications and device features to read different types of texts while also equipping them with strategies for reading and comprehending digital texts (e.g., short and long pieces of fiction and nonfiction texts, graphic images, maps). As educators, having targeted conversations on digital reading, its purpose and uses in the classroom (e.g., independent reading, research, close reading, discipline-specific reading), and ways to promote deep reading of digital texts for each purpose is important.

As part of these conversations, the following questions warrant further research and invite educators to think about the learning and literacy demands of reading digital text and how e-readers can be used for a range of reading purposes:

•  Does leisure reading of digital text require different reading behaviors and practices compared with reading digital text for academic purposes?
• When is skimming the text for keywords appropriate and when is it not?
• What types of digital reading require a lot of scrolling and scanning (e.g., maps, interactive graphics, timelines) rather than close reading?
•  What strategies do students need to learn to read long pieces of digital text?
•  What behaviors support reading stamina of digital text? How might these differt from those that support stamina for reading printed text?
•  What types of experiences provide students opportunities to use digital devices effectively to practice close reading of complex digital text?
•  How can educators collaborate with publishers to help them develop more interactive fiction and nonfiction digital texts?
•  What else do we need to learn about the adaptive behaviors of students who read digital text with e-readers?

Reading is a personal, social, and cultural act. In her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf explains how technological advancements have been changing the reading process. Using e-readers to read digital text in K–12 learning environments is here to stay. As more students use e-readers to read digital text, we need to learn more about how individuals interact with the devices to read and learn, think about the structure and demands of each type of digital text place on the reader, and provide instruction to facilitate reading comprehension of digital text.

Vicky Zygouris-Coe, PhD, is a professor of Reading Education at the University of Central Florida.

This article is part of a series from the International Reading Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

“When my teacher posts her videos, I feel like she is at home helping me learn whenever I need her.” —One of my fifth graders

Envision a classroom where students come to class filled with knowledge and excitement about a topic you are studying and ready to begin working on engaging activities as soon as they enter the room. “Flipping” your classroom can help you achieve this goal.

Flipping is the concept of using teacher-created videos to deliver instruction prior to students coming to class, so class time can be spent working on projects and assignments that you would normally give for homework. By creating your own short videos (approximately one minute per grade level) for homework assignments, students build background knowledge. When they come to class, they can make stronger connections to the content, ask questions, and get to work on the enrichment activities. You become available to differentiate your instruction for the needs of each student. It’s a win–win: Everyone gets assistance at the level of instruction they need, and you get to teach the good stuff in class!

When I bring up flipping in my teacher education classes, students are usually intrigued as well as cautious and skeptical of the idea, which is a good thing. However, after three years of teaching preservice teachers, I have yet to find a student who doesn’t see the value of flipping the classroom. We start our investigation by learning about the SAMR Model of technology and studying the benefits of videos available through Khan Academy. We also research work of flipping pioneers, Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams. If interested, you can connect with them and over 14,000 flipping practitioners on the Flipped Learning Network.

We explore applications like SMART Notebook Software, Screencast-O-Matic, and EDpuzzle. I like EDpuzzle because you can upload your videos and then add questions and stopping points to assist with processing and accountability of the lesson. It also lets you know who watched the videos and how students answer your embedded questions. We practice recording videos and then design lessons for 3–5 minute flipping videos that introduce a skill or strategy while holding students accountable for the content within the video.

Graphic organizers, entrance tickets, notes, answering questions, and other strategies are incorporated into the video presentations. We create lessons, practice them, and then record them on our Weebly teacher websites. When filming, we consider things like backgrounds, lighting, sound and voice quality, and that they don’t need to be perfect. By the end of the project, students are excited to be their own “Academy”—one where students and their families hear their messages and bond through the learning experience. One of my favorite benefits is that students can watch, stop, and replay the videos as many times as they want while learning content in addition to studying for quizzes, tests, and exams. How often do students have time to rewind you in the traditional classroom?

So where do you start flipping? I suggest the work of Bergmann and Sams. They know their stuff, are passionate about flipping, and understand the practical application as teachers themselves. Bergman was recently a guest blogger for Blackboard with a post titled, “What Academic Leaders Should Know About Flipped Learning.” Their website, FlippedClass.com, contains an amazing collection of introductory flipping videos sponsored by Edutopia’s Flipped Learning Tool Kit (or on YouTube). You can also access research, flipping tools, and contact information for questions on their website.

One very important message they share and I agree with is to make your own videos. This helps you bond with your students, engages them in the content you are teaching, and proves that you are still their teacher! Give it a try. I think you will enjoy the experience and the many benefits that come from flipping your classroom.

Mary Beth Scumaci is a clinical associate professor with the Division of Education at Medaille College in Buffalo, NY, and a mom of kids who flip. She instructs teachers in training and educators about integrating technology to enhance the curriculum while motivating and engaging learners.

“Can we do this again?” Isn’t that what every teacher loves to hear? It’s always rewarding when students find your lessons engaging and want to repeat an activity. It’s even more satisfying when students ask this question after a lesson that you want to explore further, not just after a game you played to review for a test. Interactive presentation tools such as Pear Deck can help teachers create lessons that are both engaging and meaningful.

What is an interactive presentation tool?

Remember attending staff development sessions with PowerPoint presentations and thick, stapled note-taking packets? Maybe you even subjected your students to similar presentations. Today, there are many more options for engaging your students.

Interactive presentation tools, such as Nearpod and Pear Deck, allow you to create PowerPoint–type slides, but now you can ask questions and get instant feedback from all of the students in your class as you present. By sharing a link and code to your slideshow, students can sign in and see the presentation on their devices. A slide could contain information, questions, or both in multiple formats. As students respond on their devices, the answers (without student names) can be displayed on the projector screen.  

One of the biggest advantages of tools like Pear Deck is that every student can now participate freely in discussions. Teachers can instantly catch a glimpse of each student’s understanding, even those who never raise a hand. This is what formative assessment looks like in the digital age.

Sometimes teachers shy away from new technology or feel overwhelmed by it. No need to worry when it comes to tools like Pear Deck and Nearpod. If you have ever created a PowerPoint slide, you can create an interactive presentation and have your students using it tomorrow.

What does using Pear Deck look like?

I began using Pear Deck in my seventh-grade language arts classroom two years ago. In addition to the features mentioned earlier, Pear Deck offers the following:

• Pear Deck is a Google Drive app, and each session of a presentation can be saved to your Google Drive. Student names are attached to their answers in the teacher view.
• Did the bell ring when you were halfway through your presentation? No problem, just save the session and start it up again the next day. When students join they will be brought to where you left off automatically.
• There is a variety of question types in Pear Deck: multiple choice, number response, text response, drawing, dragging, and more. You can also have slides with information, videos, pictures, and websites.

Teachers across disciplines and grade levels are using Pear Deck. Here are some ideas for using Pear Deck in language arts classes:

• Check for understanding of a read-aloud book. Ask students to identify characters, vote for a favorite character, or explain the theme.
• Have students draw a scene from the book and review the drawings with the class.
• Post photos of different versions of the book cover and have students circle the one they think is most effective.
• Post four photos on a slide and have students drag a dot to the image that most closely resembles the setting of a story.
• Ask students to write a simile. Review student answers and discuss what makes an effective simile.
• Teach close reading skills by reading and discussing a complex text using Pear Deck.
• Working on editing skills? Have students drag a dot to the error in the sentence, or use multiple choice to ask them to choose the correctly punctuated sentence.

No matter what you ask your students to do on Pear Deck, the real value comes in discussing the answers as a class. Instead of hearing from the same two or three students, you have an answer from every student. This leads to much richer and more meaningful discussions. And at the end of class, your students will want to know when they will be doing this again.

Tim Flanagan is a seventh-grade language arts and social studies teacher at Pawcatuck Middle School in Stonington, CT. He holds a sixth-year degree in Instructional Technologies and Digital Media Literacy from the University of New Haven. You can read his blog and follow him on Twitter.

In the book Words Onscreen, author Naomi Baron cites research that might surprise you: When it comes to reading for school, today’s students prefer reading on paper over reading onscreen. According to Baron, our students may compose copious amounts of digital writing on their personal devices, but when it comes to close reading, students still prefer printing a PDF and annotating it with a pencil in hand.

Baron cites a study from late 2013 whose findings show that 84% of U.S. college students say they prefer print over digital text because it’s easier to bookmark and highlight. Baron readily admits this may change with time: “Annotation becomes easier on digital devices, especially for those who practice” (p. 30).

There’s no doubt that our students will get a lot more practice annotating online. In fact, annotating the Web is nothing new. The developers of Mosaic, one of the earliest browsers from the ’90s, envisioned a Web that anyone could annotate. And there’s no shortage of web annotation tools—AnnotateIt, Bounce, Diigo, Genius, and Marqueed, to name a few. But one tool I’ve been incorporating into my teaching lately is Hypothes.is.

Hypothes.is was developed using the standards of the W3C (the major governing body of the Internet), specifically the standards of the W3C Annotation Working Group. The mission of Hypothes.is is to enable a conversation over the world’s knowledge by creating an open platform for the annotation of any web document—images, videos, and data.

The easiest way to use Hypothes.is is to find a webpage you want to annotate and paste the URL into the search bar on the homepage of the Hypothes.is website. After that, a sidebar on the right of the screen appears allowing users to begin annotating. If anyone else has annotated the page, their public annotations are visible too. Another way to see what’s been annotated is to scroll through a webpage and then click on any highlighted areas.

You can add annotations by selecting an item on the page and clicking the annotate button; you then have a choice of making that comment public or private. Users have the ability to add tags as well. Some educators use tags to create streams of content based on a common term for the group. Then members can follow the group conversation more easily by following that tag. For example, one massive online open course on Shakespeare uses the tag moocspeare to help organize their conversations.

This past summer, I taught teachers getting their masters in educational technology. These educators came from three continents, and we viewed hypothes.is as a way to facilitate asynchronous discussions across multiple time zones. Pictured in this post is a snippet of our conversation about the NMC Horizon Report: K-12 Edition in Hypothes.is.

The interface allowed us to highlight the PDF of the text, make notes on it, and then reply to one another’s thoughts on the article. In addition, users can invite others into the conversation or share the annotations. A feature I find useful for my high school students is sorting annotations by date or by users, so that producing a portfolio of a student’s annotations for assessment is easy.

Baron is probably right that many of us still prefer annotating on paper when it comes to the close reading that we do for academics, but one of the affordances of web annotation is the potential for massively open online reading. Tools like Hypothes.is will make this only easier.

Chris Sloan teaches high school English and media at Judge Memorial Catholic High School in Salt Lake City, UT. In the summer, he is an instructor for the overseas cohort of Michigan State University's Master's in Educational Technology.

I have had an ongoing interest in understanding young people's fanfiction writing and their participation in online affinity spaces, with a goal of informing the important work teachers do in literacy classrooms. As part of this research, I (with my research assistant, Valerie Marsh) have been conducting a longitudinal case study of Laura, following her as a writer from the end of middle school through high school.

Over the years, we have conducted periodic interviews with Laura, her family, and one of her English teachers, and we have collected samples of her writing across spaces and time. We have a window into the writing Laura does to express her Broadway musical fandom on the website FanFiction to meet expectations in honors and Advanced Placement English classes, to draft a novel for eventual publication, and to deepen her connection with characters she plays as an actress in school and community theater productions. We can see how Laura makes sense of writing for a variety of audiences and purposes, considerations important to writing instruction.

In our article in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, published in March, we focused on her online fanfiction writing, exploring how the access, anonymity, and genre conventions provided by the website facilitated Laura’s writing for and with audience in ways unavailable to her in other contexts. As Laura explained in one interview, “In fact, fanfiction might have been my first introduction to the concept of audience.” Other researchers have noted that sharing writing online accomplishes the following:

• It places both the writer and the writing “among the audience” in ways that impact what writerly choices get made
• It connects the author with a passionate, public audience that provides direct feedback
• It demands that writers consider the audience’s expectations as they write

Drawing on this work and danah boyd’s concept of networked publics, we came to understand Laura’s fanfiction writing as networked writing, revealing how the writing process and sharing with the audience are inextricably linked. Laura composed her fanfiction texts with abstract audience expectations in mind, expectations she understood by participating in this networked public. She also crafted her fanfiction texts in direct response to the audience feedback she received when she posted her writing on FanFiction.

What does this mean for writing instruction?

As the Common Core writing standards require students to “use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others,” teachers can play an important role in students’ learning about what it means to connect with audiences in a digital age. We concluded writing instruction should include two important components:

Scaffolded opportunities to share writing with offline and online audiences. Such instruction might involve providing students anonymity as they share their writing first with the classroom audience, and then for authentic online audiences that reach beyond the school. Through these writing tasks, students’ writing would be evaluated by the audiences that give them feedback, rather than by the teacher. Students could then begin to consider wider audience expectations as they craft their writing.

Explicit instruction guiding students to critically analyze audiences in networked publics. Laura indicated to us that she became familiar with the Fanfiction.net audience’s expectations by reading others’ posts and “by accident.” We see a role for writing instruction to guide students through a process of researching an online space, and studying the texts that get shared as well as the feedback mechanisms available and how they’re used. Such analysis can help young writers develop a profile of the networked public before writing a piece to be shared with that audience.

Teaching networked writing in these ways can further connect writing instruction to students’ interests in online spaces. More importantly, scaffolding students’ critical analysis of how to write for and with the audiences in networked publics can empower youth as they seek to solve real-world problems.

Jayne C. Lammers is an assistant professor and director of the secondary English teacher preparation program at the University of Rochester. She can be reached on Twitter at @URocProf.